Inherited Risk: Colonial Legacies and Climate Vulnerability in Sri Lanka – Part 2

Photo courtesy of WSWS

When floods disrupt transport routes or extreme heat affects agricultural production in Sri Lanka, the immediate impacts are often visible but another crisis frequently unfolds more quietly in the weeks that follow. Daily wage workers lose income almost immediately when work stops. Informal labourers face prolonged instability with few financial protections. Plantation workers experience disruptions to already fragile livelihoods. Families take on debt to absorb sudden income loss. Migration pressures increase as local opportunities shrink.

For many households, climate shocks are not isolated environmental events. They are economic turning points.

The labour market is already structurally precarious. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), nearly 66% of employment is informal. Informal workers often lack employment contracts, insurance protections, paid leave or income continuity during crises. For daily wage earners, even a few days without work can destabilise household finances. And these consequences are not distributed evenly.

The workers most vulnerable to climate disruption are often those already positioned within insecure labour systems – informal workers, plantation communities, migrant labourers and low income households dependent on climate-sensitive industries. Agriculture still employs around 30% of the workforce despite contributing less than 10% to GDP. This imbalance matters because it means millions remain economically dependent on sectors highly exposed to rainfall variability, flooding, drought and heat stress. Climate change does not create these conditions from scratch. It intensifies labour systems shaped over generations by extraction, inequality and economic dependency.

This is one of the least discussed dimensions of climate vulnerability: the way colonial labour structures continue to shape who bears the greatest social and economic costs of environmental disruption today.

The plantation economy never fully disappeared

The plantation system introduced under British colonial rule was not simply an agricultural model. It was a labour regime designed around control, immobility and extraction. Workers brought into plantation economies were tied closely to estates through housing, wages, debt and limited mobility. Entire communities became economically dependent on a single form of labour within geographically isolated regions. Access to land ownership, education and alternative livelihoods remained constrained for generations.

The objective was not long term social mobility, it was the maintenance of a stable and low cost labour force. While the economy has evolved significantly since independence, many structural features of this labour system continue to persist in altered forms.

Today, the plantation economy still directly and indirectly supports the livelihoods of nearly one million people. In some plantation regions, multidimensional poverty rates remain significantly above urban districts despite decades of economic growth nationally. At the same time, climate instability is already affecting plantation productivity.

In 2023, Sri Lanka’s tea production dropped to one of its lowest levels to a five year low, shaped partly by economic disruptions but also by changing environmental conditions affecting cultivation. For plantation workers paid through output-based systems, declining yields often translate directly into declining wages. The labour landscape has diversified since the colonial period however insecurity remains deeply embedded within it.

Climate stress amplifies existing inequality

When floods damage agricultural production, work opportunities decline. When extreme weather disrupts transportation networks, informal workers lose daily income. When prolonged droughts affect crop yields, debt burdens increase. When repeated disasters reduce local economic stability, migration pressures intensify. These impacts are rarely temporary.

During the 2024 flooding events, more than 250,000 people were affected within days with extensive damage reported across infrastructure, agriculture and housing. But the secondary economic effects received far less attention. In flood-affected districts, informal vendors, transport workers, fisheries workers and daily wage labourers usually experience prolonged income disruption even after emergency relief operations ended.

Similarly, the 2017 floods and landslides, among the worst in Sri Lanka’s recent history, affected over 600,000 people and caused billions of rupees in economic losses. Yet much of the long term burden fell on households dependent on unstable daily income rather than formal salaried work.

A single disaster may destroy homes immediately but the longer term effects often continue for months resulting in migration increasingly becoming part of how households manage risk.

Migration becomes a climate coping strategy

This movement is not always framed explicitly as climate migration. More often, it appears through gradual shifts: workers leaving districts after repeated crop failures, families seeking urban employment following flooding or overseas migration increasing after local economic disruptions. But climate stress frequently sits beneath these decisions.

Sri Lanka already has a long history of labour migration. In drought-affected agricultural districts, workers may move temporarily toward urban informal sectors after repeated harvest losses. Fishing communities facing declining catches and coastal instability may diversify livelihoods or migrate seasonally. Younger workers from plantation areas increasingly leave estates entirely in search of unstable but potentially higher-paying urban employment. But migration itself can introduce new vulnerabilities.

Workers entering unfamiliar labour markets often face unstable employment conditions, dependence on intermediaries, unsafe working conditions or weak legal protections. Women entering domestic work sectors may experience heightened insecurity, particularly when migration decisions are driven by urgent household financial stress.

Again, these dynamics are not entirely new. Colonial labour systems relied heavily on controlling the movement and dependency of workers. Contemporary labour precarity operates differently but many underlying patterns remain familiar: constrained choices, economic dependency, weak protections and unequal exposure to risk. Climate shocks do not invent these vulnerabilities, they intensify them.

The invisible side of climate risk

Climate governance frameworks tend to focus heavily on environmental hazards like rainfall intensity, flood forecasting, heat levels, drought severity and infrastructure damage. These measurements are essential but they capture only part of the crisis. Far less attention is paid to how climate shocks reshape livelihoods, income stability, mobility or household stress in real time. This creates a major blind spot.

The Disaster Management Centre regularly tracks physical impacts but there is far less systematic monitoring of post-disaster labour instability, household debt accumulation, disrupted migration patterns or informal sector collapse. Yet these slower economic shifts often determine whether communities recover or fall deeper into long term vulnerability.

Recent displacement patterns across South Asia increasingly show how environmental stress and economic precarity overlap. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimates that weather-related disasters displace millions annually across the region. But displacement figures alone reveal only part of the story. Many households experience prolonged economic instability without formally relocating at all.

Without integrating these indicators into climate governance frameworks, response systems will continue to overlook how environmental shocks evolve into broader social and economic crises.

Beyond hazard maps

This is where emerging approaches that connect environmental stress with livelihood vulnerability begin to matter. Frameworks such as the Climate Exploitation Risk Index (CERI) are beginning to explore how climate events interact with labour insecurity, economic dependency, protection risks, child exploitation, gender based violence and many such indicators rather than treating them separately. The importance of such approaches lies not only in measuring environmental exposure but in identifying how social vulnerability evolves before visible crisis fully materialises.

Climate vulnerability is not simply about who lives in flood-prone areas; it is also about who can absorb income loss, who has mobility options, who carries debt burdens, who lacks labour protections and whose livelihoods remain structurally exposed to environmental disruption. The challenge is that many of these vulnerabilities remain poorly integrated into mainstream climate adaptation systems.

The afterlives of extraction

Sri Lanka’s climate future cannot be understood separately from the historical labour systems that continue to shape vulnerability today. Colonial economies organised land and labour around extraction. Many of the structures created during that period – dependency on climate-sensitive industries, concentrated labour communities, limited mobility and uneven protections – continue to influence how risk is distributed across society.

Climate shocks now interact with these inherited inequalities in increasingly visible ways. But vulnerability does not begin when disaster strikes, it accumulates quietly through unstable work, economic pressure, disrupted livelihoods and constrained choices long before systems officially recognise the crisis.

If labour insecurity rises predictably under climate stress, then the question is no longer whether these patterns exist. The question is why they remain largely invisible in how climate risk itself is measured and addressed.

Read Part 1 here: https://groundviews.org/2026/05/13/inherited-risk-colonial-legacies-and-climate-vulnerability-in-sri-lanka-part-1/